Suppose someone wrongs you and you want to emphatically mar their reputation, but only insofar as doing so is conducive to the best utilitarian outcomes. I was thinking about this one time and it occurred to me that there are at least two fairly different routes to positive utilitarian outcomes from publicly shaming people for apparent wrongdoings*:
Epistemic status: Musing after a glass and a half of shabbat dinner wine
I think we implicitly operate under an assumption that _everyone knows who is shamed_, even if the name is not said. This is the power of the "blind item" in a gossip column -- the person being gossiped about knows it's about them, and much of their inner circle can, even if a random everyday reader can't decode it.
So if you _do_ name the person, it feels like a step beyond what would otherwise be done. A step that, in other words, feels like it's not only calling out the behavior but saying, "there is nothing wrong about shaming this person publicly; they're maybe not part of our moral community any more." That's part of why traditional Jewish thought holds rebuking others to be appropriate, but publicly shaming others not to be. (Yes, this seems messy both in theory and in practice).
I'm suspicious of the claim that not naming gets you more of B in general. A counterexample: are you more or less sympathetic to gain of function research now that the WIV has been accused of causing a pandemic via risky GoF research?
My guess is that the reason it seems that way is that naming is particularly tempting when you want to make someone feel bad, and people who want to make someone feel bad are usually unconvincing to the discerning.
Epistemic status: Musing after a glass and a half of shabbat dinner wine
I think we implicitly operate under an assumption that _everyone knows who is shamed_, even if the name is not said. This is the power of the "blind item" in a gossip column -- the person being gossiped about knows it's about them, and much of their inner circle can, even if a random everyday reader can't decode it.
So if you _do_ name the person, it feels like a step beyond what would otherwise be done. A step that, in other words, feels like it's not only calling out the behavior but saying, "there is nothing wrong about shaming this person publicly; they're maybe not part of our moral community any more." That's part of why traditional Jewish thought holds rebuking others to be appropriate, but publicly shaming others not to be. (Yes, this seems messy both in theory and in practice).
I'm suspicious of the claim that not naming gets you more of B in general. A counterexample: are you more or less sympathetic to gain of function research now that the WIV has been accused of causing a pandemic via risky GoF research?
My guess is that the reason it seems that way is that naming is particularly tempting when you want to make someone feel bad, and people who want to make someone feel bad are usually unconvincing to the discerning.